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September 13, 2009

Did You Notice the Obama Cut-Outs* and all the Psycho Joker Obama Posters** at 9/12 Teabag Rally?

When you start seeing representative images like this — the HuffPo photo caption reading: “Demonstrators take photos of an Obama sign placed under droppings from a police horse,” it’s easy to think about the photo below in a new context:

If you look at the first slideshow at this post at Huffington (which is where the linked image above came from), it suggests that the MSM — and I’ve looked through most of the wire images of the event, as well as the NYT and WAPO published staff photos — avoided those signs and scenes bluntly threatening (to) Obama or painting him (with a blatantly racist brush) as a Muslim extremist.

We were hoping to get BNN contributer Alan Chin down to DC this weekend but he got tied up, which is unfortunate because it was this discrepency — the effect of the media filter watering down the tone, the animus — that we were interested in exploring.

A nod, by the way, to Maureen Dowd who notably broke the gentility this morning with her frank comments about Joe Wilson — comments that reflect directly on the visual media’s handling of Dick Armey’s extravaganza (cynically scheduled and branded to appropriate 9/11 and the anniversary, by the way).

She writes:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”

The danger of “taking the hard edges” off this radical and racist thrust is to “normalize” the Teabaggers and frame them as far more innocent than they really are.